HP Labs sees ARM, Atom, memristors in server future

HP Labs continues to conduct
experiments on the nanostore concept with promising results. But
Ranganathan declined to provide any specifics, noting the work is still
as much as three years from commercial products.

Such
devices could ride a confluence of multiple waves of change. “The
technology changes and workloads inflections ahead are incredibly
interesting for system design,” he said.

In computing, he noted
processors made a “sharp right turn” in about 2005 when performance
gains for single core processors plateaued and multicore architectures
took off.

In storage, disk drive capacity has outpaced data
access times. DRAM capacity growth has taken a “soft right turn” from
traditional levels of 60 percent a year to about 25 percent a year, he
noted.

The rise of server SoCs and eventually 3-D stacks along
with flash memory in server designs could help breakthrough such
bottlenecks. The changes come about the same time that networking is
shifting more deeply from copper to optical links.

“Compared to a simple click, which once was just to a
single Web server, we now have very sophisticated data analysis from
multiple repositories with complex cross correlations,” he said. “It’s
big data, but it’s also fast data from multiple streams with deep
analytics."Related stories:

@bobdvb: It's unclear because they haven't said much about the lo0gic part of the device.
Many researchers including some at Stanford and Berkeley have talked about kinds of smart memories before. HP's unique angle is using its memristor as the memory.